In the winter of 1798-99, shut up in the freezing German town of Goslar, William Wordsworth began producing lyrical fragments that appeared first in letters written to Coleridge and emerged eventually as source texts for The Prelude. These lyrics are revolutionary because they construct a new version of the autobiographical 'I'. The Wordsworthian first person, which becomes the prototype for so much subsequent writing about the self, emerges out of an interplay among complementary and conflicting questions: How could a struggling 28-year-old author write a 'great' poem? How might he satisfy the expectations of his imagined, as well as actual, readers? How should he fashion his own life into and out of poetry?
The constant writing and rewriting of a poem with many titles over many decades was a textual act designed, at least in part, to answer such questions. The Revolutionary 'I' explores the numerous voices of the poetic speaker 'Wordsworth' and their relationship to the historical figure who shared the same name, offering the first sustained analysis of the complex autobiographical voice in Wordsworth's poetry.

Ashton Nichols's The Revolutionary 'I' trawls through versions of The Prelude up to and including the 1805 text in search of a fundamental Wordsworthian orgininality, which he believes is a generative source of most subsequent imaginative literature in English...he believes that Prelude breaks new autobiographical ground with its presentation of the I as a dramatized cultural self rather merely a mimetic revelation of identity.' - James Treadwell, The Wordsworth Circle

Preface: The Prelude as Prologue
Silencing the (Other) Self: Wordsworth as 'Wordsworth!' in 'There was a boy'
The Politics of Self Presentation: Wordsworth as Revolutionary Actor in a Literary Drama
Sounds into Speech: The Two-Part Prelude of 1799 as Dialogic Dramatic Monologue
Coleridge as Catalyst to Autobiography: The Wordsworthian Self as Therapeutic Gift, 1804-1805
Dialogizing Dorothy: Voicing the Feminine as Spousal Sister in The Prelude
Colonizing Consciousness: Culture as Identity in Wordsworth's Prelude and Walcott's Another Life
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index

ASHTON NICHOLS is an Associate Professor of English at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, USA. He is the author of The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment and numerous essays on nineteenth century literature and postcolonial literature. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of East Anglia.